11 ms·

One pattern that I consider "dark", but don't see in this list, is using loaded options on a dialog box. One that I often see in apps is like: Rate our ap

• Waterluvian 10y ago
  Yeah I hate that. Beyond what you said, it also suggests to me, "Not Yet must mean that it will annoy me again and again." Even if that's not true, I may never visit the page again if my perception is that it's gearing up to annoy me. I will often see: OK, NOT YET, DON'T SHOW AGAIN. Which I think is fine.
  • seanp2k2 10y ago
    Yeah, and I don't expect that anyone tricked into / accidentally clicking "rate now" is going to leave anything but a zero-star review complaining about how the app tries to trick them and has annoying nag screens. I've written a few of those myself, then chuckled to myself since the developer was so short-sighted. If more people did that, they'd probably lay off with the "rate my app" pop-ups. If I REALLY love an app, I'll go find the developer on twitter and thank them, and write some nice reviews.
• mvid 10y ago
  Tinder is the worst I have seen, they require you to pick between 1-5 stars to get the dialog to go away at all. Guess who always gets one star.
  • jkaptur 10y ago
    Wait, if they're requiring you to pick 1-5 stars to get the dialog to go away, it must be a custom dialog built by them, right? I bet they take your one star and just hide the dialog, but take people who rate it as 5 stars to the "real" app store rating page.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • mvid 10y ago
      That is absolutely what happens. So irritated people like me go out of their way to open the app store and review directly.
      • Hydraulix989 10y ago
        There's also the brilliant idea that they show a giant "Why?" text box if you rate 1 or 2 stars, so that you type away your frustrations and after sufficiently venting, you do not actually go to the App Store to write that review.
    • hota_mazi 10y ago
      On Android, apps can't self rate like that, all they can do is take you to the store page and let you rate their app. The app can't know what rating you gave. Does iOS let apps self rate like that? This seems inconceivable to me. Bottom line: when an app keeps pestering you to rate it, say "Yes fine I'll rate you", they take you to the app store and there, you do nothing (or one-star them). The app should register that you rated them and stop pestering you with that dialog.
      • st3v3r 10y ago
        I don't think either platform lets that happen. Still, if you know your user is going to rate anything less than 5 stars, why would you still take them to the store to rate? And the amount of people who lie on those dialogs is quite small.
      • eropple 10y ago
        I think maybe you're not parsing it--they're asking you to rate the app inside the app, with a dialog box created by and owned by the app, and only pushing you to the app store if you're a 4 or a 5. Apps on Android totally can and do do this.
  • chaoticgeek 10y ago
    This annoys me so much that when an app does this to me I actually go to to the app store to give them 1 star.
  • rhizome 10y ago
    IIRC, you can hit the back button on that.
    • ghostly_s 10y ago
      Nope, you can't.
      • BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
        Yes you can, on Android at least.
  • redwards510 10y ago
    Tinder has another horrible UI trick, not sure if it qualifies as dark pattern or just terrible coding. On Android, they require you to enable the global option "Always allow Wifi scanning" in order to get your location. If this is disabled, they pop up a dialog saying "Enable? Yes | Cancel". Hitting "Cancel" immediately pops the dialog back up again, so you cannot use the app at all until you click "Yes". edit: Some of us do not want to enable this power-draining, privacy-sucking global option just to use Tinder. An xposed framework module was created to bypass the check, but Tinder has actually begun checking for it and the app doesn't work properly if it is enabled.
    • choicenotchance 10y ago
      Yeah. They want the location always. Fuck that. Why not just take it from the ip address you can detect?
    • BHSPitMonkey 10y ago
      Yeah, that should be grounds for expulsion from the Play Store if you ask me. It's clearly an abuse of the runtime permission system.
• monix 10y ago
  Other big players like Microsoft are doing it too. And that dialog can be worse: Do you like our app? <Yes, rate it> <Later> It's also freaking annoying because it interrupts your workflow, the thing for which you ended up installing that stupid app in the first place. It's basically disrespectful of their users' time and needs.
  • duiker101 10y ago
    I feel you... I do it in my app and I hate doing it, but it's a necessary evil. Way too many people see the comments/ratings as either a support board or a way of punishing bad apps but very rarely they give a good or even just decent review, without being asked.
    • artursapek 10y ago
      It's not necessary at all.
    • techsupporter 10y ago
      > I feel you... I do it in my app and I hate doing it, but it's a necessary evil. This is what makes the IT part of my heart die a little inside even more: when even the "good folks" in this industry feel like they have to do obnoxious things just to get ahead or keep up. Folks, this is why the bigger arguments about competition or arbitration and so on always come back to the same point ("there's no meaningful choice"): Eventually, everyone winds up doing the same thing because it's the only way to simply not lose ground to the others who are doing the obnoxious-overall-but-good-for-just-me-in-the-short-term tricks. If I uninstalled every app that demanded this...well, I'd have very few apps. And that's even worse because it's just obnoxious enough to help the individual app developer but not so obnoxious as to spur people onto meaningful action, yet the annoyance is still present...always grating on nerves...disrupting just a little bit of productivity or happiness...needlessly.
      • erlehmann_ 10y ago
        Do not delude yourself: The “good folks” in the industry do not do this.
• pesfandiar 10y ago
  There's another brilliant app rating pattern (perhaps a dark one). A dialog pops up and asks if I loved their app. A "yes" takes me to the marketplace for rating, but a "no" only allows me to send them feedback. It both positively skews the ratings and collects feedback from disgruntled users.
  • prawn 10y ago
    And you almost need to this because app store reviews are so deadly otherwise. You have no way to respond to reviewers (who've had problems) as you might on TripAdvisor and virtually no one goes out of their way to find an option to send feedback before going nuclear in a review.
    • nulbyte 10y ago
      The Google Play store, at least, allows developers to reply directly to reviews. Others can see their reply as well.
  • mathijs 10y ago
    Not necessarily dark though... as an app developer I'd actually really want to hear the feedback from the people who dislike my app. As in any business, oftentimes the most disgruntled customer is the one that can provide the most useful feedback. An even smarter way (in my opinion) of getting 5 star reviews is by showing the dialog only after x hours of use. Users most likely to rate badly will have the app uninstalled before the dialog shows.
    • nilved 10y ago
      The dark pattern is that you're biasing your review rating by not taking negative users there.
      • GrinningFool 10y ago
        Which benefits everyone if the problem is a simple thing you can resolve by helping them directly. Support is also part of the experience, and good customer support should factor into the review as well. I can see how you'd see this as providing a positive bias, but I see it more like getting a chance to see if you can't help the customer out before they give up on your app. It also reminds the customer that there are people on the other end - so even if the issue can't be resolved, and you still get a one-star rating, the level of vitriol seems likely to be reduced - something all too easy to forget when angry-reviewing. Of course if they just take the feedback and dump it, that's a different story - but again, I would think anyone with that experience would still leave the negative review. TL;DR - too many downloaders use negative reviews as a combination support request and cudgel. I think this is a reasonable defense against that.
• dawnerd 10y ago
  Even worse: the ones that go "Do you like the app/ Are you happy?" Either option will leave the app. No opens up your email with the to filled to their support and yes opens the app store.
• prdonahue 10y ago
  This. I hate this more than I can express in a public forum. Google is notorious for it, especially when they try to get you to use the YouTube app rather than the web interface. It's not "maybe later" I want—it's "never ask me again".
  • Loic 10y ago
    Google Maps on Android is massively using dark patterns. If you are on the go and open the app, it requests to enable the location service to continue. The choices are: "Enable location service" or "Cancel". It is phrased in a way that it will not run the app if you tap on "Cancel" but it works perfectly if you select "Cancel". The worse, if you agree, it enables the location service for everything all the time where you have the feeling it was just for the Maps app. I just discovered that 2 days ago and I must say I was really really angry at Google for this clear dark pattern use.
    • godelski 10y ago
      And if you have the location service always enabled this gets creepy https://www.google.com/maps/timeline https://www.google.com/maps/timeline
    • rplnt 10y ago
      I was once dismissing it for like 2 months before I accidentally accepted it. And Google is really shitty app publisher in more ways than this. Has anyone ever seen a meaningful changelog in any major app of theirs?
    • abawany 10y ago
      Thank you. This has been going on for a while (as I recall, a Maps update last year first committed this crime - wish I had an apk backup of the prior version). I now use HERE WeGo or OsmAnd (on non-GAPPS devices, from f-droid). While the experience is not nearly as cool, I love the fact that I am not participating in uncontrolled monitoring and unexpected battery drainage.
      • 10y ago
• jpfed 10y ago
  <Yes, send me offers!> <No thanks, I like to waste money and wallow in ignorance>
• artursapek 10y ago
  There's a tumblr for that! They call it "confirm shaming". http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/ http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/ And yeah, it's UX cancer.
  • cm2187 10y ago
    And even Apple is doing it. You you want to update your iphone now or tonight?
    • artursapek 10y ago
      Software updates are the rare case where I can forgive it. It's annoying to have clients actively resisting updates, especially security updates.
      • cm2187 10y ago
        If it was only about the security update. But in the case of iOS it is not. It's is the opportunity to start the nagging all over again. Please start using iCloud. Let's use Apple Pay now. Let's use Apple Music. On every single minor "security" update...
        • bigtunacan 10y ago
          Even worse; let's break backwards compatibility with your paid software so that you have to purchase an upgrade license... If you've had a Mac long enough and you run paid software you know what I'm talking about. :(
          • thirdsun 10y ago
            Considering the wide availability of beta OS updates, I'd say that's on the developers of said software. Sure, as someone who works in audio and has to deal with a range of software instruments/effects and audio interface drivers, I know exactly what you're talking about and I have little understanding for developers expensive software/hardware that don't test and fix their products before OS releases.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• Hydraulix989 10y ago
  There's also the "pre permissions pop up" trick where a dialog that looks almost exactly like the iOS permissions box shows up first, and only THEN does the real one show up if the user "agrees" to accept it. Remember, as an app developer, if a user denies the iOS permissions dialog in your app, you can't EVER show the dialog again -- the user has to manually leave the app and re-enable the permission in the iOS Settings. Successive calls to the function to ask permission automatically return false for "denied" so it is in the developer's best interest to try to avoid showing the real iOS permission pop up unless the user somehow indicates that they are going to accept the permission (in this case, in the "pre permission" clone dialog). There's even GitHub projects and CocoaPods for this: https://github.com/yahoo/YMPromptKit https://github.com/yahoo/YMPromptKit When I used this "trick" (yes, I'm guilty), only a handful of thousands of users actually accepted the soft-prompt and then successively denied the real iOS hard prompt.
  • st3v3r 10y ago
    Is it a dark pattern, though? You're respecting the user's wishes to not use that permission (ignoring for the moment that you couldn't use it even if you wanted to).
    • Hydraulix989 10y ago
      Yes, permission requests should only show up at most once, per Apple, so it is definitely gray area. Not to mention, the pre permission dialog is usually deceptively similar to the Apple one.
      • illumin8 10y ago
        It's not a grey area, it's a dark pattern, and you're basically intentionally breaking Apple's app policies, and screwing your users over just to get more permissions than you would get if you followed the rules. Fuck you.
        • Hydraulix989 10y ago
• flukus 10y ago
  We need to start rating apps that do this as 1 star, the problem will solve itself.
• 0x0 10y ago
  The correct thing to do here is to hit "OK" and just kill the App Store App without leaving a review (since they can't tell if you actually review it). Or maybe leave a 1 star and a note that you were coerced into rating it!
  • uabstraction 10y ago
    1 star App developer insisted upon a review, so they got one.
• austinl 10y ago
  Related: there's an unfortunate cause of excessive app rating prompts — what's shown in search results/top charts/other areas (on iOS) is the average of the latest version, not the overall aggregate. If you're at a company that does scheduled releases (e.g. once every three weeks), you'll need to continually ask people to review the app to keep that rating high. Otherwise you only get ratings from new users and users that are discontent with the particular version. It's rare that people who have already rated the app 5-stars will continually go out of their way to rate the app 5-stars again without prompting.
• nullc 10y ago
  My favorite one of those was Android 6's "share my location and the wifi ssids of everyone around me with google button" on a Nexus 5. It had a [don't ask me again] checkbox that when set greyed out the option to disagree.
  • ajnin 10y ago
    It's a case of bad UI rather than a dark pattern, if you click 'disagree' it always remembers the decision, the checkbox only affects the 'agree' button.
• snissn 10y ago
  Why is that a "dark pattern"? What trick is it trying to pull on you?
  • Sharlin 10y ago
    It presents the user a false dichotomy.
• draw_down 10y ago
  I just click ok and then don't actually do the rating.